Posted tagged ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’

Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript to remarks given by Steve Bannon and Pat Caddell at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2017 Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 16th-19th at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.

Steve Bannon: The last time I was in this room was a couple years ago. I made a film, “Occupy Unmasked,” about that war starring David Horowitz and Andrew Breitbart, which was actually the film we were making when Andrew passed away and David was kind enough to take a bigger role in that. But that film, I think, showed the precursor of a lot of what laid the groundwork for the Trump victory.

When I stepped into the campaign in mid-August of 2016, I think it was August 14th — these numbers are rough — but roughly, the candidate was down anywhere from 12 to 16 points, basically double digits down in every battleground state, every state that had to be won. Not a lot of money, and as you’ve seen from revelations in this investigation with Manafort, not a lot of organization. The campaign from the time that Corey Lewandowski had left until the time I stepped in in August had really deteriorated into a pretty disorganized mess that left the best candidate I think we’ve had since Reagan in real extremis.

And that’s what I knew we had. I knew we had a great candidate. I knew we had an individual who I believed was the finest orator in American politics since William Jennings Bryan and, more importantly — and I told the President, or the candidate this when I took the job on the 13th and 14th: “Don’t pay attention to any of these numbers. Don’t worry about how many points down we are. Don’t worry if we’re in the battleground states. It’s not relevant because what is relevant is the themes that you’re going to run on and how we’re going to bring this home. We only get 85 days, but we’re going to compare and contrast Hillary Clinton as tribune of a corrupt and incompetent elite. And we’re going to focus on a handful of themes that show you as an agent of change, and all we have to do is give people permission to vote for you as that agent of change, and we’re going to win this.” And I told him that day on the evening of the 13th and then the day of the 14th, because he’s a percentage player and he was asking what percentages. I said, “You have a 100 percent chance. Metaphysical certitude of winning. Not a question. 100 percent.” And we’ll get into it later about Billy Bush week, etc. “But you have 100 percent chance.”

The reason is what David said. This is a war. This is a war for our country. This country, we’ve been in this war for a while. It’s going to take another 15, 20, 25 years and we’re going to be one thing or the other on the other side of this. We’re either going to be the country that was bequeathed to us by the 14 or 15 generations that came before us, or it’s going to be something radically different. And David Horowitz has been the leader of telling you what that radical difference is going to be and what this country is going to be if we don’t fight and fight every day to take it back.

The reason that I could step in with a team of Dave Bossie and Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh and others and help the President — because he’s really the one that won it; basically gave him the platform so that he could drive his message home — is for years I had been spending time listening to a guy that I came to greatly respect. That guy’s Pat Caddell and Pat had been doing research. There’s another of the unsung heroes, a gentleman who came to Restoration Weekend every year. It’s a Palm Beach resident named Lee Hanley. Lee Hanley’s like when you read the history of the American Revolution or the Civil War, all these great events, you find out about these individuals in back that never won any credit, but if it was not for them, the victory would not be achieved. Lee Hanley for years was a big believer. Although a guy of tremendous wealth and lived in Palm Beach and throughout the rest of the world, he had an incredible appreciation for the grassroots. He had a real love of the hobbits, of the deplorables, and he put his money where his mouth was. He’s a big supporter of the Tea Party movement and Tea Party causes. But I think what he’ll be known for is that he was the guy that really became the sponsor for the analytical work and the intellectual work that Pat Caddell did over a number of years.

And this work, two things epitomized the Trump revolution or the Trump revolt. It’s J. D. Vance’s book, “Hillbilly Elegy.” If you haven’t read it, it’s quite powerful, the sociological content of the Trump revolt. But as important was Pat Caddell’s analytical work on where the country was, and that’s what I told the candidate that night. I said, “Hey, two-thirds” – is it two-thirds or one-third? “Two thirds think the country’s going in the wrong direction. Seventy-five percent think America’s in decline. Virtually none of the electorate believe that Obama brought the fundamental change they wanted, and people are looking for an agent of change.”

Now the mainstream media doesn’t cover that. You wouldn’t know that by the campaign in mid-August 2016. That was never talked about. But that tone below the surface is the foundational element, the keystone that really drove the Trump campaign. And so, Pat, I’d like, if you could, just tell us what it is — and this is very important. We’re going to talk about how we won, and what the underlying analytics of that was, and then, to get to David’s point: It makes total sense when you see that on the left, there was no honeymoon, right? Because they will never concede, ever, that the basic working-class Americans think America’s in decline. Because it’s been their watch. And the elites in this country will never admit to that, and that’s why from Day One, the second part of this talk will be about the nullification project. Because since 2:30 a.m. on November 9, when AP called the election, the progressive left, the opposition party media, and the Republican establishment have been on a nullification project. Pat, you want to talk about the math?

Pat Caddell: First of all, let me echo what Steve said about Lee Hanley. Back in 2011, 2012 actually — 2012 or 2013 — after the Romney disaster election or as I call it, the confluence of the Republican consultant lobbyist core of gangsters, the “RICO campaign.” Anyway, I said, “I think something’s happening in the country.” Lee said, “You know, I think something may be too. I want you to go out and just find out.” He wasn’t for anybody or any cause. It was basically to discover what was there, and it was the most startling research that’s ever been done. It has been public for some time. The press has never paid attention. The political class won’t pay attention. But what we found from the beginning was the level of discontent in this country was beyond anything measurable, and I believe worse than any time that we have ever seen in our country.

Steve mentioned a couple of the attitudes: about things going in the wrong direction, the 70-75 percent of people who absolutely believe the country was in decline, a narrative so different from what Washington was telling us or the mainstream media if you looked at the way they covered the conventions even. Oh, my God! It’s so dark. It’s like the inaugural speech. That’s so dark! It’s terrible! No. It happened to be the truth, but they’re not allowed to speak that.

And then another attitude, which is really important, was the fact that in a country where we believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead (as Bill Clinton used to tell us), about 15 percent of the people believe that’s what works and 85 percent believe that the rich and powerful have rigged the rules and have the advantage, which is also a truth.

When I was at Harvard — I was at my class reunion, which I’d never been to before for a reason — I had to do a survey of my class, the Class of ’72, which was, I would describe, the epicenter of the white Ivy League privileged class, they actually were higher. The only thing they were higher than the American people on was 95 percent of them knew that’s the way it worked because that’s how they worked it. But in any event, those things all led to also the fact that a couple of attitudes have maintained themselves, which I realized the real question about them is, would anybody weaponize them? Let me just give you a couple examples because they’re important.

“Political leaders are more interested in protecting their power and privilege than doing what is right for the American people.” Eighty-one percent of the Americans agree. By the way, we have a divided country except when it comes to how Americans from left to right really think of how this country works. It isn’t partisan. At this point, it’s overwhelming. “The power of ordinary people to control our country is getting weaker every day. Political leaders on both sides fight to protect for their own power and privilege at the expense of the nation’s wellbeing.” Seventy-nine percent agree. These are from just a few months ago. “Powerful interests from Wall Street banks to corporations, unions, political interest groups, have used campaign and lobbying money to rig the system for themselves. They’re looting the national treasury of billions of dollars at the expense of every man, woman and child.” That’s 72 to 75 percent who agree.

“I believe the government is working for the people’s best interest.” Twenty-eight percent say that’s true. Sixty-seven percent don’t think it’s true. “Politicians really care about me” — when I first started polling and then Bennet wrote this question, the result was it was about a 40/50 split. It’s now 19 percent say yes, agree, and 76 disagree. And perhaps most interesting of all is the question we asked on whether the Declaration of Independence says that the government receives their authority from the consent of the people. “Does the federal government today have the consent of the people?” And it’s 68 to 75 percent we’ve ranged saying no, and I call that, when I first saw that result in 2013, a pre-revolutionary moment. And the question was whether anybody would speak to any of this.

And from the beginning, Donald Trump, a lot of his own instincts were – it’s not exactly the way I would’ve designed it – but he managed to make a campaign and he stood up against 16 other people who were, in their own ways, essentially epitomizing the political class or the ideological class of their party, when the issue was neither ideology or the right of kings of our political class to rule.

I said the day before the election, I wrote a piece because I needed to get it out, because I’d been doing some work for Breitbart and had been doing some polling, and we were asking some more in-depth questions and I could see what I had found in a big study we had done in September, which was that you had a quarter of the country who were not favorable to either Clinton or Trump. Most of those people were concerned about Trump’s qualifications, whether he had the temperament to be President, things that would’ve normally disqualified. Hillary Clinton was viewed as a, let’s put it this way: 75 percent of the people, including almost a majority of her own people, believe that there are two sets of rules of law, one for everyone else and the one for the Clintons.

And corruption is a problem and we’ll talk about that today, but at the heart of much of this was a sense of the corruption and loss of our country. Those people started breaking for Donald Trump. Well, I was waiting for that to happen. I’d seen some evidence in a different situation in 1980 with Reagan and Carter, but what was important was when I saw the exit polls. Everyone saw the exit polls when we got them at 5:00, 5:30, the networks and everyone were going, “Oh, Hillary’s got it! Hillary’s got it!” Well first of all, nobody remembers that those polls are always wrong because of the bias in them, but more importantly, nobody bothered to look inside. The people who had said that they were unfavorable to both were now breaking to Trump by 18 points. And I called Steve and said, these exit polls are all wrong. This is a key break. And it is breaking for Trump.

I do believe, and I don’t want to get into it, but this mistake of early voting: we were supposed to have an election, not a rolling election. It is a problem with all the unintended consequences, people vote who will change their mind. So, there you have it. Trump won and everyone else in the media was stunned because they would not look at the country that they actually deplore.

Steve Bannon: What do you think was the specific messaging that drove those low propensity voters to actually, at the end of the day, pull the trigger for Trump?

Pat Caddell: Yeah, as I said, my question all along had been whether those voters would respond. Alienation can often make people depressed and not participate. What did it, I think, is if you look at the last 8 to 10 days of Trump’s message, where he said, “This isn’t about me and Hillary. This is about you and them.” Essentially a campaign that said your country is going to hell. You have to do something. And whether it was on immigration, which was a big issue, trade, where the country had taken a huge leap, or basically the idea, which I think was the most powerful of all, of “drain the swamp” and the corruption. Enough people felt that they, with good reason, would want a change, and they took the biggest gamble in history.

By every other measure we have had, this never should have happened. But the reason it did is because the country has never been where we are except twice before. I believe in the 1820s and the Civil War – well three times – and the Great Depression. And what we have is a new paradigm in politics. This isn’t the traditional Democrat/Republican, Liberal and Conservative. This is inside, outside, us, them and the question of who’s country it is, and I have said to Steve the other day, and I’ll end on this note: At the heart of it is a perception. The subtext is that they know that their leaders are trying to manage the decline of America.

Steve Bannon: This is the key point.

Pat Caddell: They think that their job is to make –

Steve Bannon: The reason, okay, we’re going to frick and frack this a little bit. This is the key point. The American people have a great common sense. Right?

Pat Caddell: Yes. That’s the ideology of America.

Steve Bannon: When Pat Caddell starts to stand, we’re in trouble.

Pat Caddell: Yes, you are. Yes, you are.

Steve Bannon: Now he’s really about to go Old Testament prophet. If you remember CPAC a couple of years ago, he was in a ballroom this size, and people were Tweeting, “you gotta get up there.” Caddell was so over the top. He was Caddell unchained. I thought they were going to throw a net over him and, you know, escort him out.

Pat Caddell: And they never had me back after that.

Steve Bannon: No, the issue of the polling and the analytical work, which was so thorough — this is not some slapdash poll like is done all the time. This was really deep analytical work. The question that the American people answered — 75 percent of your countrymen think America’s in decline. And what they understand is the country is in decline, right? Particularly vis-à-vis the rest of the world. And that’s what the elites, that was the whole contrast in the campaign. Hillary Clinton and the Republican elites are very comfortable managing that decline.

Pat Caddell: Yes, they believe their destiny, I think, is to make sure it’s soft, we’ll be like the British. I have news for them: this election in 2016 and the ones that are coming are really about the fact that this country will not go gently into that good night of decline. They will rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Steve Bannon: Now here’s the great news is that who understands this is the American working man and woman. I mean, that’s why Trump’s brilliance of “make American great again” resonates so strongly.

Pat Caddell: The single greatest slogan in my lifetime in American politics, in terms of what summed it all up.

Steve Bannon: That was compared and contrasted to — what was Hillary’s? “Happy together”? What was that? “Forward together” or whatever it was. “Happy forward together.” Always forward, never back.

Pat Caddell: The millions of dollars they spent to come up with the dumbest slogan I’ve ever heard of is amazing.

Steve Bannon: Before we get to the victory and talk about what happened the next day, you’ve got to remember — and this is very pertinent, I think, to the folks in the audience. I think 85 percent of the votes in the Republican primary, if you totally take away all the bistate stuff and you look at the total vote count, I think 85 percent went to Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Dr. Ben Carson. But you couldn’t get three more anti-establishment guys, right? It shows you the party — this is what McConnell and the donors don’t get. The votes are with the working men and women of this country, the Republican Party.

Pat Caddell: Well, let me make a point on that. All during the primaries, I was on a show we had on Fox which a lot of people watch called Political Insiders with Doug Schoen and John LeBoutillier, and all along we kept noticing — they’d look at the vote of the anti-establishment candidates everywhere you go, and you’re right. Yes?

Pat Caddell: Nah, I’m done. I know when I’m not wanted. No, this is the fact that in both parties — look what you have with Bernie Sanders. And we’ll hopefully get to a point to talk about that rigging of that system. But Bernie Sanders, who nobody ever cared about and whatever, he rolls up, he and Trump were, as I like to say, were supping out of the same trough. Like on trade and corruption and whatever, Wall Street. The same thing on both from opposite ends. And that’s what the unity of these numbers were about.

Steve Bannon: And the numbers show you — and the strategy we had, we had kind of two plans. But the first plan we had to take — remember this is 85 days to go. You’re basically going to get blown out, and if you read their books, they thought they were going to win by 25 or 30 points. Take the House, the Senate, the courts. It was basically over. Break the back of the Republican Party. But the key, we had to win Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Iowa just to get to the table. And by the way, I don’t think in living memory any Republican has done that. You had to get there just to get to the final, that was the bridge that got you to the final. We had a Plan A and a Plan B, but Plan B, which was shattering the blue wall in the upper Midwest, we did some very specific demographic analysis around how the messaging that Pat had overall talked about was playing. And we see could see it in places like Youngstown, Ohio, and Dubuque, Iowa, and other places, that the message was resonating with not just Republicans, but with blue-collar Democrats or Independents that had not voted for a Republican in living memory. And that’s why we could see western Pennsylvania, we could see Wisconsin, we could see Michigan. We could see that something was changing, and that was the message, this underlying discontent in the country and wanting fundamental change. And Trump’s ability to be the instrument or the messenger that was starting to galvanize people.

It was interesting, the only question I had internally is that the math looked so dramatic. And we kind of knew. We were working on this and it was coming together, because we could see the crowds were getting bigger at the rallies and were getting more vocal. The Facebook and all the social media stuff was working. Her campaign specifically didn’t come to these places. They didn’t come to Wisconsin until — they never came to Wisconsin. I don’t think they came to Michigan until the very 11th hour, and so we really knew that there was something underlying the Trump message, and that’s this discontent in the country that’s still there today. In fact, I would actually respectfully submit it’s probably greater today than it was even a year ago, and that’s about the progress or maybe the lack of progress that’s been made.

I want to talk about the morning after. And Pat, you’ve got a thing with the Clinton campaign of one of her books. David talked about a honeymoon. There was no intention of a honeymoon, and here’s why. They do not think that this was a legitimate election and that we won legitimately. They will never be able to admit that the working men and women of this country basically revolted, essentially from both political parties, and elected a total and complete outsider. Someone who’s not a professional politician. Someone who can connect and does not use the vernacular of the political class, but somebody that can connect viscerally with the working men and women of this country and had an agenda of being a complete disrupter among the institutions that really govern the imperial city. If you think about it, and I’ll talk a little bit more about it tonight, the geopolitical situation we’re in that’s driving the economics of this country. But the ascended economy of Silicon Valley and Wall Street and Hollywood and the imperial city of Washington, D.C. is completely detached from the reality of everyday life in the rest of America. And they will never ratify the election of 2016, because to ratify it is actually calling into question their own tenuous grip on power. We saw that immediately, and Pat’s got a very interesting quote he’s pulled out from one of the Clinton books.

Pat Caddell: The book “Shattered,” which was written by the two embedded reporters in the Clinton campaign, who were to chronicle the great victory and ascendancy of Hillary Clinton, and this is what it says. This is how it started. “The strategy had been set well within 24 hours of the concession speech. Mook and Podesta, the campaign manager and chairman, assembled their communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up and up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already Russian hacking was at the centerpiece of their arguments.” And that’s how it began.

Steve Bannon: Yeah, this nullification project, which was both from the left and also from, I think, the Republican establishment, started immediately on the morning of the 9th and the 10th. They had to come up with an excuse for why they lost. It wasn’t the fact they had $2.2 billion. It wasn’t the fact that they spent $750,000,000.00, I think is the number I’ve heard, on negative ads against Donald Trump. It’s not the fact that they had, I believe, the worst candidate for President of the United States in memory.

They kept saying how brilliant she is, how genius she is, how smart she is. I think she’s dumb as a stick. She’s doing her book tour. It’s another 900-page book that she’s written. In fact, I would just like to have the corrupt media and publishing industry just write her a $10,000,000.00 check and don’t force another 900-page book on us. But no, I do think, in her current tour, or at least until the Donna Brazil situation came up, that Pat will talk about in a minute, that she’s got every intention of testing the water to run again in 2020. And my response is, “Bring it baby. Bring it.” Would you not love to see a rematch of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? C’mon.

Pat Caddell: As Saturday Night Live predicted last week, with her in the final episode for the Democrats, “One more time for me. Maybe one more time.”

Steve Bannon: Let’s talk about this nullification. The Russian whatever this thing is, the collusion project, is, look, as the campaign CEO in the last 85 days as we drove to victory, I can tell you categorically that we had a very difficult time colluding between the Trump ground game in Pennsylvania and the RNC. So collude that. It’s a complete phony, hide-the-football misdirection play, but it shows you their desperation.

Pat Caddell: Let me make just two quick points on this. First of all, the one I wanted to make, if Barack Obama knew about this in August, so did the “intelligence team,” those hacks, that as Trump described them, which they are. And if it were such a threat to America, why was the President of the United States keeping his mouth shut until the day after the election, and how come nobody bothered to tell America it was under attack? Because it didn’t matter. On the Facebook stuff, Mark Penn, who had run Hillary’s great campaign in 2008, did say the $100,000 on Facebook ads, $56,000 of it after the election, half of it in states that were California, New York and Texas? Let me tell you something, the Stanford University Economics Department did a major study on this, and they found nobody believes what they see on Facebook. It’s the least credible source. And, yet, you know why they have to glom on to that? Because underlying is the subtext that you people, the American people, are too damn stupid that you could — all of the billions spent, the debates, people know what they’re getting. They’re weighing this heavily. No, no, no. You’re so stupid, you can be misled because you didn’t listen to us, and that is their message.

Steve Bannon: That is why it’s so important I think for the defense of the President is we’re seeing something unprecedented here in American history. And I think it’s very important we fight it and we drive it into the ground as much for the Democrats as for Republicans. And the fact that if we allow this nullification project to continue to go forward, if we allow this nullification project to really get traction and to try to bring charges or whatever against the President, every election here on in, trust me, is going to be contested. We’ll be like a banana republic. You won’t have elections that matter.

Now, let’s talk about the nullification project where they’re trying to drive the President into the ground. There are currently, I think, five or six major investigations going on with the President right now. You’ve got — and this is what upset me so much when I left the White House. My specific project was against Republican leadership because you have three, count them, three committees on Capitol Hill with full subpoena power and the unlimited budgets. You had Devin Nunes today, one of the great young men on Capitol Hill. He’s a hero, and he should be running the investigation on the House Intelligence. Why is he not? Because Paul Ryan doesn’t have a spine. The media screwed Paul Ryan. By the way, Paul Ryan’s a nice guy. He’s a good guy, but he doesn’t have backbone in this regard. The Republicans, the media can spook these guys and they’ll run. Nunes has turned it over essentially to Schiff, so you have a Democrat running the House Intel Committee. You have Mark Warner, who’s going to run for the presidency in 2020 against President Trump, you have him running the Senate Intelligence because Burr’s just taking a pass on this. So you have two Democrats running this and leaking everything to the media. The thing’s gone way outside Russian collusion. They’ve got Michael Cohen and his lawyer and other guys up there talking about real estate deals, taxes, whatever. The Judiciary Committee is hauling in Don, Jr. and these other guys. Can you imagine, can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had won? Would Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have three committees on the Hill investigating Hillary Clinton and her campaign and her finances and let two Republicans run it? No. Because they are professionals. They run the Democratic Party like it’s supposed to be run, and they never give up, and they understand this is a war, and they understand the way they’re going to win is be unified.

In addition to that, you’ve got Bob Mueller. And I was one of the biggest advocates in the White House saying, “You can’t fire Comey.” For a whole host of reasons, because, at the end of the day, you’re going to end up with something like a special council like a Bob Mueller, and I’ve been adamant. Bob Mueller, in regards to his mandate of looking at anything with Russian collusion, he should be able to do that. He should have a budget for that, but I support Ron DeSantis. When he’s outside the range there –and on Manafort, all 12 indictments are about back taxes and “money laundering” and stuff he took from other people. Rick Gates didn’t even have — he walked in with a public defendant. He didn’t even know that he was under investigation. So this thing, I think, has gone way off the rails in the fact that it’s much too broad and not within a mandate. And look, Jeff Sessions, I consider him a dear friend, but I think Sessions and people on the Hill got to support the DeSantis Amendment, which says hey, there’s going to be a time period and a budget to look at collusion with Russia. Anything else is off limits.

Pat Caddell: Yeah. Well, I want to add just a quick comment to this, which is I want to hear from my good friend Mr. Abrams. When he speaks about the Justice Department, it seems to me that department is still embedded deeply with the people who have been in the business of supporting whatever the political class and particularly Democrats want done. And let me say something. When you get someone appointed like Bob Mueller, who is “highly respected by everyone in Washington,” grab your wallet. The last person that they told me that about was James Comey. I mean really. Anybody who everyone says is this great, respectable guy, you got to watch out because he is there doing business that is not going to be very productive for the country.

Steve Bannon: The nullification project, also, is a joint venture. It’s both the Democratic Party and the Republicans. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, in fact, it has taken tremendous pressure on them even to say these things have got to be brought to an end. They’ve got to end around Christmas, and they got to have joint reports. You can’t let them have two reports. And that’s not officially done yet, but these guys are just as culpable in this as the Democrats that are baying from the left.

Pat Caddell: Look, Donald Trump’s greatest opposition is not from the Democrats. It is from the Never Trump Republicans who fill now several networks, cable news networks, with people whose virulence to Donald Trump makes the Democrats in those places look tame. And the Jennifer Rubins, the Washington Post and its 15 pieces a day attacking Trump, the New York Times, all of which, by the way — and it’s another point that we’re getting a little progress on the rest of the corruption. It seems to me that the notion that we should move on, and, by the way, all this other stuff never happened, which I don’t know if we’ll get to, but it’s just bullshit, but pardon my language, but it is. The corruption here is so deep.

And the difference with the Democrats and the Republicans as, David pointed out and Steve just said, let me tell you something, the Clintons, as I once wrote in 1998, have forced the Democrats to squeeze themselves into that tiny little space that’s known as Clinton morality. My party’s had to give up all of its principles in order to sustain corruption, which is why the left is in motion. And, by the way, one point, when you have a large majority saying both the Democrats and the Republicans are out of touch with the country, that coalition is in jeopardy except as long as you fight them. And the Republicans not only don’t fight, they stab themselves in the back and their President.

Steve Bannon: See, that’s the point. Remember, the point of the nullification project is, their ultimate goal is to remove President Trump from office or to force him to resign. That’s their goal, but they’ve got a second goal, which they’re just as comfortable with, and that is to so damage him in the eyes of the American people that he’s very restricted on what he can do and what he can accomplish, and so that’s why every day you see this drumbeat. And I will tell you, outside of Breitbart and Gateway Pundit and a handful of others, the sore losers in the media, in the conservative media, starting with my beloved Wall Street Journal owned by Rupert Murdoch, they’re just Never Trump organs every day. The Never Trump guys have a complete ability to just launch on the President, and so I think if you’re a supporter of President Trump, we’ve only really started this fight because this is going to get really gnarly over the next couple of months. I think it’s going to get, by the end of the first quarter of 2018, I think it’s going to get quite volatile, and so the President is going to need all of his supporters to fall in and have his back on this thing.

Pat Caddell: Let me say, I’ve been thinking about 2018 election, and now I know what this is going to be about. And I believe the Democrats can’t control their left. It’s going to be from beginning to end, if the President is smart — and sometimes I don’t understand, frankly, the politics around the President, because in some ways I think he is being misled and taken down the primrose path by the very people he clobbered and wiped out. And I’m sorry, I’m independent. I can say this. It makes me very sad because the swamp — I won’t even get into the tax bill, which I think is an example of this, but let me tell you what, the campaign starts on the issue of if the Democrats win, they are going to impeach the President in the House for sure.

The question we’re going to have is the one we kind of had in Wisconsin. Do we have what Steve said: our democracy collapses now because now we can throw out who’s in there that we don’t like, and that question is bigger than Trump, and it is about the democracy. And the real question is who is sovereign in this country, and the American people intend to be the sovereign masters of their country. And you got to appeal to them on that basis in this kind of fight.

Steve Bannon: One thing to keep in mind on the 14th, the first phone call I made was to Reince Priebus at the RNC to work out a partnership in which we could work together. I’m a fire-breathing populist and a nationalist, and I am damn proud of it. But in order to win, we win as a coalition. And this is one thing I could never forgive Bush 41 for when he said the other day in this book, “The Last Republicans” — I think it would be better titled, I hope, “The Last Bush Republicans.” When old man Bush, between grabbing women in the oval –yeah, I went there — when he says that he voted for Hillary Clinton and when Bush 43, the most destructive president and the most destructive presidency in the history of our country, including James Buchanan, when he says he didn’t vote; he voted some write-in or he didn’t vote for President Trump, that’s all you’ve got to know about those guys. If they can’t see the basic fundamental difference between what the regime of the Clintons would be versus what President Trump offered, then I’ve got no time for them. Right?

But to Pat’s research, it shows in high relief exactly what we’re fighting. Everything you see on cable TV, everything you see in the foreground is just pro wrestling. It’s really to divert the attention of what’s really going on. At the end of the day, the Bushes, this is the Bush that goes around with Bill Clinton and he says it’s like the son I never had. Old man Bush is going around saying Bill Clinton, because the permanent political class is inextricably linked with themselves, and you see it on this current tax bill. The donor corporatist lobbyist consultant apparatus that runs Washington, D.C. — and I’m very proud of Peter Schweizer, that hero. A true patriot hero. Peter Schweizer’s effort in the three books, “Throw Them All Out,” “Extortion,” and then “Clinton Cash,” which exposed how the apparatus works and why the seven of the nine richest counties in the country surround Washington, D.C.; why the per capita income in those counties is higher than the per capita income in Silicon Valley for the first time in our history. And Silicon Valley is the greatest generator of wealth in human history. So you see, it’s a business model, and they’re not prepared to give it up, and they’re not prepared to go. They’re not prepared to go quietly.

But on that campaign, the establishment, at least some of them, came together and worked with us, and that’s how we got a win. We have to be unified. We’re not going to get everything. I’m much more of a protectionist when it comes to trade. I happen to think that free trade is a radical idea. I think it’s a radical idea, particularly against a mercantilist authoritative dictatorship like China. You cannot allow your markets to be totally open. Not everybody agrees with that. A lot of guys at Heritage don’t. A lot of guys at Cato don’t. A lot of guys at AEI don’t. But we’ve got to work together to pull this off because if we lose we’re never going to get this country back.

Now, you’re seeing that, I think David brought up this point on our show this morning. He just brought it up here in his introduction. The question before us is very simple as conservatives. Does the establishment that still controls the apparatus of the Republican Party, is it better for them to control that apparatus in a minority or is it better for us to take that apparatus and keep a majority? Because, quite frankly, they would rather be in a minority as long as they control that apparatus because it’s central to their business model.

Pat Caddell: Right. Exactly. They never cared about losing. I learned that in 2012. The most important thing was to maintain their piece of the action. And let me just say something because this is a time for real, thoughtful, intellectual, political debates about where to go. My problem with the Republican Party is the voters want nothing to do with their leadership. They have proven that over and over. Look at the latest poll in Alabama where McConnell has a rating of 21 percent favorable and almost 60 negative among Republicans. The people know this. They voted them out. They beat them every chance they could, and the question is whether that group — and I’m concerned about the Independents who supported Trump. And many Democrats on the other side, particularly labor, blue-collar people, that is a governing and ruling majority if one can achieve it. And how this all works itself out is the real challenge. But I think you have to go to high ground.

The issue is the country. It’s not which party. It’s going to be who owns the country, them or you. And the question is is America going to go into general night of decline or are we going to turn things around for our children and grandchildren. These are great moral questions. And that is the new battleground that needs to be fought. And let me just say something. The media. The press, which was you could argue is adversarial, but what we have is not adversarial. We have a partisan opposition press which works hand in glove with the Democrats, which is the most corrupt media, and which, by the way, as a believer in the First Amendment, totally threatens the First Amendment, because as I have tried to say to people, when they figure out, which they have, that they can not only tell you who you must vote for, but they can tell you what truth you’re allowed to know or not to know, as we have seen in all of this other stuff with Russia, all of the stuff with the Clinton Foundation, all these things. The real question becomes why do we need a First Amendment if they’re not going to do their job, which is to be the tribune of the people and instead become the outriders of one political movement or another.

Steve Bannon: See, I look at it differently than Pat. I like having the media as the opposition party because they’re so dumb and lazy. I detest them. I detest them. Dumb, lazy, worthless. A great opponent. One last thing, we’ve got to wrap up here, is that it’s about the President. It’s about Donald J. Trump. Look, I got the great opportunity. I’ve known him for years, but I didn’t know him that well until I got into the campaign. I saw it every day. Here’s a guy, everything you see in the mainstream media is basically nonsense. Here’s a guy that was worth, I don’t know, five, six, seven, eight billion dollars. I don’t know the exact number, but a lot of money. He was 70 years old. He has a lovely wife, a great family, great kids, grandchildren. The friends he’s got from the sports and entertainment world and the business world are so close to him and such great people. He just had a perfect lifestyle. I mean here’s a guy at 70 years old that’s going around not just buying great hotels and refurbishing them and making them part of his Trump organization, but buying great golf courses and making them better and getting them in the U.S. Open or the Open Championship. It’s the kind of thing you would do, all of us would do when we’re 70 years old. He ran for President of the United States. He’s not a narcissist and not in it for his ego or anything like that. You couldn’t do it for that. I saw this guy every day on the politics of personal destruction where they came after him hammer and tong. And you guys only saw a tenth of it. If you saw the other 90 percent, you’d just be stunned. These people know no bounds. I don’t really disagree with it because I see what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to take control of the most powerful nation on earth, and they’re prepared to do anything to do that.

Donald Trump is an American hero because he had the courage to step up and run. In that primary, if you think about it, with Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Christie, go through all of them, 16. That was the Republican Party’s an entire generation of their best politicians that have been kind of bred for 10, 20, 30 years. And as good as those gentlemen are and Carly Fiorina, there’s not one, or even combined could they have taken on the Clinton apparatus. The Clinton apparatus is a killing machine, and it took somebody like Donald Trump, a blunt-force instrument, to defeat it.

Pat Caddell: Let me make a point, then you can finish. I just want to say one quick thing. The authenticity question, which is important, even during the election better than two-thirds of people believed that Trump was authentic and that Hillary wasn’t, including almost half of Hillary’s own voters, so that will tell you something. And the last comment I have to make is what you’re seeing with Mr. Franken, when you see what’s coming, when they announce, when they have to release the $15 million of your money that was paid out in 260 settlements secretly for sexual harassment, it’s going to make the bank scandal of 1990 look like nothing.

Steve Bannon: One last thing, David. Look, I would love to wave a magic wand and tell you it’s all going to be better, right. Take your nappy off, powder your bottom, pat you on the head and tell you that November 8th, we’re going to celebrate it every year, November 8th and 9th as MAGA Day. It’s a high holy day for the populist-nationalist conservative movement, but this is why things like Restoration Weekend are so important. Every day’s a fight. And the guys on the other side of the football, and they showed this in Virginia, they’re going to outwork you. They’re going to out-hustle you. If we’re not prepared to line up and fight every day, we’re going to lose this country. We’re going to lose it. If you’re prepared — and I’ll take the guys on our side of the football. I’ll take the hobbits. I’ll take the deplorables. I’ll take the working men and women of this country, but as long as you’re prepared to lead them and prepared to say we’re prepared to fight this every day. We’re prepared to have Donald Trump’s back every day, and we’re not going to take defeat, and when something happens like Judge Moore down there, on the first allegations you run for the tall grass, to hell with you. Thank you.

Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to infect everyone on the Left who is incapable of coming to terms with the fact that President Trump emerged victorious a year ago. From late night shows to washed up comedians, it appears they are hell bent on making complete fools of themselves. It has even infected academia, where a Harvard Law professor named Lawrence Lessig suggested that Hillary could still be President. How is Trump able to drive these people crazy? Bill, Steve, and Scott explain this phenomenon.

Would it be too optimistic to expect two giant hurricanes — one flooding a good swatch of Texas and Louisiana and the other about to lay waste to the Eastern seaboard — to shut up the Trump bashers for ten minutes?

Apparently so, because no sooner does the president make an agreement with Schumer and Pelosi to raise the debt ceiling as well as set up a large fund for Harvey recovery and out they come from the left and right — from the left to crow about some sort of “victory” and from the right to complain that the deal didn’t lower the deficit.

Deficit? It’s as if Trump should have been playing hardball and calling for a government shutdown while Irma was tearing through Florida, sending the Pirates of the Caribbean into Tennessee with people fishing in their living rooms, if they’re lucky enough to have a living room anymore.

The shrinks talk about having “the right conversation at the right moment.” Making a fuss about the deficit in the midst of twin national catastrophes the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades and will cost who knows how many billions to repair is the exact opposite. It’s having the most counter-productive conversation at the worst possible moment.

And it’s even stupider because the new debt ceiling agreement is only for three months. In a short while they can fight that deficit all they want. As they say in Queens, “shaddup awreddy!”

As for the Democrats, left or otherwise, they should forget about that victory and save the high fives for the touch football game (if they still play that). That party’s so far out to lunch now they can’t tell the kitchen from the laundry room. Trump can afford to be generous because they barely exist and no one can recall when they last won an election. Nobody remembered Schumer’s new, new deal — or whatever it was — the day after he announced it. And it’s only going to get worse and everyone knows it. Liberalism isn’t just dead, it’s decomposed. Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming book evidently blows up what’s left of the house. No wonder Trump-bashing is all the Democrats do. It’s all they’ve got.

But that of course doesn’t stop the Republicans from shooting themselves in the foot and everywhere else. Even in the midst of two hurricanes, they seem clueless. Congress and the media remain in a horse race to the bottom while Trump, who seems decisive and in command, is seeing his numbers rise. Some Republicans appear miffed that they have been cut out of the process in favor of the even more execrable Schumer and Pelosi. Good. The Republicans need a kick in the you-know-what and a lot more. Mitch McConnell did something much dumber than incurring Trump’s wrath when he said the “naive” president expected too much too soon from Congress. The majority leader revealed his own inadequacy. “Qui s’excuse, s’accuse,” as the French say. He who excuses himself, accuses himself.

Despite the constant media drum beat and ceaseless leaks, Trump is looking more impressive eight months into his presidency than at inauguration. Only he and his cabinet are getting anything done. And the more he does, the angrier his opposition gets because, in the world of the Beltway, you’re not supposed to do anything, no matter which side you’re on. It’s as if giant “Do Not Disturb” signs had been put on all freeway entrances to Interstate 495 (aka the Beltway).

No one is more despised than the person who wants to upset the status quo, particularly an especially rigid one. He or she might show everyone else up. (Want to know why Maxine Waters hates Trump with such a passion? Simple. She’s been the congresswoman from South Central for umpteen decades and NOTHING has improved. In fact, the life of black people in her district has only gotten worse. What if Trump does something?)

But inevitably, great natural catastrophes shake things up in unforeseen ways. That’s why most contracts have force majeure clauses. We’re in the midst of double force majeure at the moment with some even greater majeure forces on the Pacific horizon of, dare we say it, thermonuclear proportions. With all of this, at some point, Trump Derangement Syndrome has got to give. One would assume that anyway. But clearly we haven’t gotten there yet

The files apparently were transferred to a data storage device at a speed not possible over the internet. Metadata also indicate that the emails were taken by someone in the Eastern Daylight Timezone and then deliberately copy-and-pasted into a Microsoft Word file that had its language settings changed to Russian in a ruse to throw off investigators.

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A bombshell report published Wednesday by avowedly liberal news magazine The Nation may have put the last nail in the coffin of the “Russian hack” narrative that has dominated the mainstream media’s coverage for the last year.

Author Patrick Lawrence assembles the findings of months of investigation by forensic computer experts and former NSA officials to conclude, quite categorically, what Breitbart News and other independent media outlets have suggested for nearly a year: there was no hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by the Russian government or anyone else last summer. An internal leaker is a much more likely source of the confidential internal DNC emails that upended the presidential campaign season when they became public last June.

The Nation, a leading publication of the American left for over a century, may seem an unlikely place for such a thorough refutation of one of the Democratic Party’s most salient talking points. Lawrence, however, is strikingly forthright. Calling the supposed hack and the continual allegations of collusion by President Donald Trump and his associates a “great edifice,” Lawrence points to the central role the “DNC Hack” plays in the “Russiagate” narrative. He writes:

All this was set in motion when the DNC’s mail server was first violated in the spring of 2016 and by subsequent assertions that Russians were behind that “hack” and another such operation, also described as a Russian hack, on July 5. These are the foundation stones of the edifice just outlined. The evolution of public discourse in the year since is worthy of scholarly study: Possibilities became allegations, and these became probabilities. Then the probabilities turned into certainties, and these evolved into what are now taken to be established truths.

Now, according to the research by the experts Lawrence cites — the group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) — a Russian government cyberattack on the DNC’s computers is likely not a “possibility.” The group has examined several aspects of the emails’ journey to the public eye and concluded it cannot be made to comport with a hacker in the former Soviet Union. The files apparently were transferred to a data storage device at a speed not possible over the internet. Metadata also indicate that the emails were taken by someone in the Eastern Daylight Timezone and then deliberately copy-and-pasted into a Microsoft Word file that had its language settings changed to Russian in a ruse to throw off investigators.

The conclusions of four of VIPS’s investigators was unanimous. Lawrance writes:

All those interviewed came in between 90 percent and 100 percent certain that the forensics prove out. I have already quoted Skip Folden’s answer: impossible based on the data. “The laws of physics don’t lie,” Ray McGovern volunteered at one point. “It’s QED, theorem demonstrated,” William Binney said in response to my question. “There’s no evidence out there to get me to change my mind.” When I asked Edward Loomis, a 90 percent man, about the 10 percent he held out, he replied, “I’ve looked at the work and it shows there was no Russian hack. But I didn’t do the work. That’s the 10 percent. I’m a scientist.”

Nothing in the report, however, dissuaded the DNC from its conviction the Russians are responsible for the publication of their internal communications. “U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government hacked the DNC in an attempt to interfere in the election. Any suggestion otherwise is false and is just another conspiracy theory like those pushed by Trump and his administration,” Adrienne Watson, the DNC’s deputy communications director told Breitbart News Thursday.

The Nation’s story is by no means the first indication something might be awry with the “official version” of what happened at the DNC last summer. Shortly after the emails became public, Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks played a major role in the emails’ dissemination, claimed Russia played no role, but this did nothing to stem the flood of assurances about a Russian hack.

The central text of the Russiagate gospel became the “Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)” issued in January of this year, days before President Barack Obama left office. Presumably this ICA, quoted for months in the mainstream media as being the work of “all 17” American intelligence agencies, is the basis of the DNC’s continued claims of a Russian hack.

The reality, as the New York Times finally admitted in June, was that only three intelligence agencies participated in the creation of the ICA. The “17 intelligence agencies” line, a fixture of pro-Russiagate media since Hillary Clinton used the figure in her second presidential debate performance, was and is fake news.

Lawrence’s piece further takes the ICA to task. “James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that ‘hand-picked’ analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA,” he writes, pointing out that not even the whole of the three agencies cited (the FBI, NSA, and CIA) were involved but only a few staffers “hand-picked” by Clapper.

The intelligence agencies, according to Lawrence, did not even examine the DNC’s computers, an omission he calls “beyond preposterous,” and instead relied on a third-party report from Crowdstrike, a non-profit co-founded by Dmitri Alperovitch, described as “vigorously anti-Russian.” The “high confidence” in Russian culpability we heard of again and again in mainstream media reporting is an “evasive term” and “how officials avoid putting their names on the assertions we are so strongly urged to accept.”

Some conservatives are already lauding Lawrance’s report and the work of VIPS as a final vindication of their skepticism. Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning, for example, issued the following statement Thursday:

If the whole premise of the [Special Counsel Robert] Mueller investigation, that Russia hacked the DNC emails interfering with the elections, is in fact false and it was a DNC insider as the Nation reports former NSA officials contending, there is simply no rationale for the special counsel to continue investigating the Russia angle. It is incumbent upon the Justice Department to determine and settle once and for all the true source of the DNC emails. The only prosecutions that can flow from that investigation must be of Obama administration officials who covered up the real facts surrounding the DNC emails, setting the nation off on this new red scare. If Mueller is unwilling to go where the evidence leads, in this case to the DNC itself and the Obama administration cover-up, then he is not fit to serve. In Mueller’s case, this is either obstruction or willful blindness.

As Breitbart News’s Joel Pollak wrote last month, the “DNC Hack,” now better known as the “DNC Leak,” the term originally used in these pages, is not the only pillar of the Russia collusion narrative to face collapse as the media hysteria passes its first anniversary. It became clear through the testimony of Investor William Browder that Fusion GPS, the research firm that assembled for a still unknown client the infamous, perverse 2016 dossier describing now-President Trump asking Russian prostitutes to urinate for his pleasure, had, in fact, worked for the Russian government in the past.

With actual evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign now looking increasingly unlikely to come to light, there are increasing indications Mueller’s investigation has shifted to looking for financial crimes allegedly committed by President Trump and his family long before and far outside the presidential campaign. The impact of the revelations unearthed by the VIPS team and The Nation on that investigation have yet to be seen.

Younger generations, of course, get this. They hear it in the schools and they watch it on television and it’s shoveled at them on BuzzFeed and the like. They are given little chance to think for themselves. And if they do, they know the risks.

Meanwhile, The Plague keeps spreading. In the 1330s the “Black Death” took about a third of Europe. It’s unlikely things would get that bad in this country on a personal level, but our democracy is already being littered with symbolic corpses, logical thought among the earliest and most consistent of victims.

Does anyone have an antidote to Trump Derangement Syndrome? I think I hear something scampering around my basement. Either it’s one of the plague rats of my generation spreading its… okay… I won’t say it.

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To what can we ascribe the continuing metastasis of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which has come to infect America, and indeed the world, almost to the level of a true plague?

The most recent of the seemingly endless incidents/outbreaks range from the ridiculous (hapless movie star Johnny Depp making a joke about assassinating the president and then recanting it…his agent must have called) to the genuinely creepy (a Democratic Party official declaring he was glad Steve Scalise was shot).

Yes, this last one was about a congressman, not the president. But we know the atmosphere that condoned it — the same atmosphere that enabled thirty GOP congressmen either to have been violently attacked or to have had their lives threatened since the beginning of May. (Such things did not happen BT/Before Trump.)

In the case of Depp, it was not so much his pathetic remarks that horrified — the actor is in the midst of a public nervous breakdown — but the raucous approval of his comments by the Glastonbury Festival audience, as if he had just given a shout-out to the local football team.

This automatic reaction by the rabble is just another example of the reach of Trump Derangement Syndrome, where assassination talk is de rigueur and Trump is regarded as a combination of Daddy Warbucks and Caligula with a little of The Joker thrown in. (Just the other day, author Michael Chabon told an Israel Radio interviewer that he wakes up every morning with the hope that Trump “is going to have a massive stroke, and, you know, be carted out of the White House on a gurney.” The surprised Israeli interviewer told Breitbart he naturally thought Chabon was just joking, but then realized he wasn’t. )

Of course the Congress, with its astoundingly tedious and extraordinarily phony Russia investigations, has congressmen and senators competing on an infinite loop to see who… mirror, mirror, on the wall… can be the most hypocritical of all. (Winner so far: Senator Mark Warner. Runner-up: Rep. Adam Schiff). They help spread the infection, scratching scabs that were, at best, of the most tangential interest months ago, until they gush blood all over again, keeping the Russia controversy alive and kicking, at least until Jon Ossoff makes his presidential run of 2032. (Not sure I’m joking.)

And speaking of competitions, the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN are no longer actual news organizations but contestants locked in a non-stop gladiatorial to dethrone Donald Trump via ceaseless leaks, most of which are either disinformation or absurdly trivial, and virtually all of which are illegal in the first place. But they don’t care. It doesn’t even seem to bother them that their journalistic reputations may be affected. They are infected. By this New Plague.

So they carry the infection on, spewing the bacterium, spreading the TDS Plague as assiduously as did the rats of the Middle Ages, the hated Yersinia pestis, no antidotes allowed, not on their pages anyway. At Blue State cocktail parties from Manhattan to Brentwood, people dare not open their mouths to say a tiny thing in favor of Trump, even to old friends, for fear of eternal ostracism. In our schools, conservatives are not allowed to speak. Patriotic films are only made if Clint Eastwood agrees, or maybe now Mark Wahlberg, on a nice day.

And then, of course, there are the #NeverTrumpers who still can’t stand Trump because he’s… well, I’m not sure I ever understood them in the first place, but I guess it’s because he’s vulgar. He may have gone to Wharton but talks as if he’s gone to Queens College.

All this is occurring although Trump, since taking office, has been, in his actions, a basically middle-of-the-road president, rather like, of all people, Bill Clinton after he made his accommodation with Gingrich. Of course, unlike Billy boy, he hasn’t misbehaved, to my knowledge, in the Oval Office. More precisely, Trump governs slightly from the right as Clinton governed slightly from the left. The differences are not greater than we have seen many times before.

Yet the Plague grows, edging almost inexorably toward violence. Why?

The “Deep State” bureaucrats feel their jobs are in jeopardy. I get that. But the rest?

May I suggest that what we are witnessing in our culture (and outwardly across the globe, because willy-nilly the U.S. is still the leading factor) is a form of mass hysterical conformism. I emphasize the conformism because by nature most human beings are conformists — we want to get along.

My generation — I regret to say since I was part of this — was nurtured in a kind of counter-cultural conformity, everyone in tie-dye and smoking joints, thinking the same inchoate ideas. Peace and Love. Hey, hey LBJ… You’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem…. Power to the People. Right on! Tune in, turn on, drop out!

As we grew up — taking over media, entertainment, and the schools — we formed a new cohort that was as truly conformist (probably more) as the generations before us. That New Conformism (actually pretty old at this point) generated this New Plague — how could it not, even though Donald was (technically) one of them — with everyone against Trump no matter what, pass it on. Otherwise, you will be read out of the new version of the hipster Volvo-becoming-Tesla country club. Trump was too Rat Pack for us (too like our parents or what our parents thought was cool). We wanted a smooth, black dude or, failing that, a righteous Latina, whatever that was. These days not even the Dalai Lama is acceptable.

It was all image. Almost none of it was substance, although we wanted to pretend it was. We were Eliot’s hollow, stuffed men, the ghosts of our parents’ Greatest Generation. But the image prevailed anyway — bland and unexamined as it was. Clichéd. Our image. John Lennon lite. It’s everywhere now. (“Imagine there’s no Donald. It isn’t hard to do.” Right, Michael Chabon?)

Younger generations, of course, get this. They hear it in the schools and they watch it on television and it’s shoveled at them on BuzzFeed and the like. They are given little chance to think for themselves. And if they do, they know the risks.

Meanwhile, The Plague keeps spreading. In the 1330s the “Black Death” took about a third of Europe. It’s unlikely things would get that bad in this country on a personal level, but our democracy is already being littered with symbolic corpses, logical thought among the earliest and most consistent of victims.

Does anyone have an antidote to Trump Derangement Syndrome? I think I hear something scampering around my basement. Either it’s one of the plague rats of my generation spreading its… okay… I won’t say it.

(Putin is winning because the national focus is on non-events. Hence, our faith in the electoral system has been damaged and the ability of the Trump administration to focus on the agenda Trump was elected to pursue has been limited. The Congress, rather than focus on legislating, is preoccupied with investigations of non-events. That’s good for America’s enemies and bad for America. President Trump’s successes in focusing on his agenda despite the many distractions speak well of him. — DM)

Smith makes an insightful distinction between “consolations, vicious self-sung lullabies” and “conspiracy theories.” Examples of the former would be: Hillary lost because the Russians hacked the election; our children died because the Jews poisoned the wells.

But such “consolations,” as vicious as they may be, only become full-blown conspiracy theories when weaponized through the mass media for political use. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would be the classic example of such a conspiracy theory. And, Smith points out, Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” do not have the platforms “to proliferate weaponized narratives capable of doing real damage to our polity – the elites do.” And those elites — the press, the intelligence community, political parties – have been used to legitimize a conspiracy theory.

James Kirchik, another anti-Trump pundit (as well as a brilliant analyst on many issues) laments the way the “confirmation bias” has resulted in well-meaning, liberal anti-Trump journalists reporting stories that they want to be true and are emotionally true for them – e.g., stories of threatened or actual violence against minorities – but are factually false.

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It is certain that Russia launched a massive hacking campaign to undermine the U.S. electoral process in 2016. That is a major issue that needs to be thoroughly investigated, and steps taken so that it does not recur.

Though the Russian involvement in the 2016 election targeted both presidential candidates at various times, it likely damaged Hillary Clinton’s campaign more. Confirmation in the emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee that the DNC had actively favored Clinton over her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, infuriated Sanders supporters. Conceivably enough of those supporters could have decided not to vote for Clinton based on those emails to have made a difference in the three crucial battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Thus far, however, the primary focus on the Russian hacking has been with respect to the far-fetched claim that the Russians colluded with the Trump campaign fashion in some fashion The obsessive focus on that issue has turned the hacking into a major victory for Vladimir Putin by introducing an unparalleled degree of rancor and paralysis into the American political system.

James Kirchik writing in the May 3 American Interest (“Who Killed the Liberal World Order”), describes how at last September’s G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China, then President Obama confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin about the Russian hacking of the DNC, and told him to “cut it out” or “face serious consequences.” In October, according to Bloomberg News, the White House used a cyber version of the “red phone” to convey to the Kremlin detailed evidence of Russian hacking of voter data banks in numerous states. On both occasions, Putin, who had long since taken Obama’s measure, did nothing in response.

WHATEVER THE REASON Putin decided to interfere with the 2016 election, it was not because he feared Obama or Obama’s legacy-bearer, former Secretary of State Clinton. Starting with Clinton’s declared “reset” of relations with Russia, shortly after the Obama administration entered office in 2009, until Obama issued his warning at Hangzhou, the United States had repeatedly stood down in every possible confrontation with Russia.

The 2009 reset itself took place in the wake of the assassinations by Russian intelligence agents of Alexander Livinenko in London, where the former Russian intelligence operative he had been granted political asylum, and of Russia’s leading investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Russia was also busy hardening control of areas of Georgia occupied by Russian troops. As part of the reset, the Obama administration abandoned plans to provide Poland and Czechoslovakia with anti-missile defenses.

During the 2012 presidential debates, Obama mocked his Republican opponent Mitt Romney for listing Russia as the United States’ primary international foe. “The 80s called. They want their foreign policy back,” teased Obama. And even prior to the 2012 campaign, Obama told Putin’s sidekick Dmitry Medvedev that he’d be able to be “more flexible” after the campaign, and asked for a little breathing room from Russia.

All Obama’s shows of good will, however, went unreciprocated by Putin. In 2013, Putin granted asylum to Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee who had exposed the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance methods. The same year Putin cracked down on foreign-funded NGO’s, and invaded the Ukraine. Obama refused to supply the Ukrainians with defensive weapons, as the United States had committed to do in the Budapest Memorandum, drafted when the former Soviet republics gave up their nuclear stockpiles.

In 2015, Soviet forces entered Syria in force to shore up the Assad regime, fairly daring the United States to challenge them. Previously, Putin had humiliated Obama by offering him a lifeline, when the latter refused to enforce his own redline against Assad’s deployment of chemical weapons.

PUTIN HAD reasons to prefer Trump to Clinton. He harbors a paranoid belief that Hillary orchestrated protests against him in 2011. And, writes Kirchik in the Los Angeles Times, he appreciated that Trump’s ignorant outbursts made “American politics – and by extension America – look like a foolish country.”

Putin may also have thought that Trump’s neo-Jacksonian, quasi-isolationist campaign talk would serve Russia’s interest in carving out a sphere of interest in its near abroad. But, as Kirchik notes in his American Interest piece, Obama’s “interconnected world,” without American power to back it up, had already resulted in a reduction of American influence and allowed Putin free rein in Russia’s near abroad.

The Russians were as shocked as everyone else, however, by Trump’s victory. Their goal was not so much to defeat Clinton, as to render it difficult for her (or Trump) to govern and to thereby “weaken the world’s last superpower,” writes Professor Mark Galeotti of the Institute of International Relations Prague in Tablet. And their means for doing so was to reduce America’s democratic legitimacy by calling the election results into question and reducing the scope for compromise and consensus in the American political system.

Or as veteran Moscow correspondent David Satter argued in the June 12 Wall Street Journal, Putin did not so much support Donald Trump, as he sought American political paralysis. The differences between Trump and Clinton were simply not that significant in his view.

Putin’s method is to sow chaos, to light a hundred brushfires and see which ones turn into full-fledged forest fires. “Putin is not a chess player,” writes Galeotti. “He and his people are improvisers and opportunists. They try to create multiple potential points of leverage, never knowing which will prove useful or not.”

One of those prongs was the so-called “Trump dossier, compiled by former British intelligence official Christopher Steele based on information “sold” to him by Russian intelligence officials. The document bears all the marks of a classic Russian disinformation campaign. “The kind of gossip that fills the Trump Dossier, writes Galeotti, is common currency in Moscow, “even if very little of it has any authority behind it aside from the speaker’s own imagination.”

One thing is almost certain: The Trump campaign did not collude with the Russians. Both Senator Diane Feinstein and Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees investigating Russia’s electoral involvement, respectively, have confirmed that they have seen nothing to implicate Trump or his aides in collusion with Russia.

The absence of collusion is, moreover, logically demonstrable. If there were collusion, the Russians would undoubtedly possess evidence of it. Since coming to office, the Trump administration has taken a much more aggressive anti-Russian stance than Obama ever did – targeting with cruise missiles an airfield and planes of Russian ally Bashir Assad and just this week shooting down a Syrian plane in a dogfight; allowing Montenegro’s entry into the NATO alliance; denying Exxon-Mobil a waiver for energy exploration in Russia; and sharply criticizing Russian support for the Taliban in Afghanistan. If Putin possessed incriminating evidence on Trump, he would have already revealed it in order to destroy President Trump. Elementary, my dear Watson.

DESPITE THE LACK OF ANY PLAUSIBLE EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION, Russian interference in the 2016 election has set in motion a “self-sustaining process,” in Galeotti’s words, in which “America is tearing itself apart with little need for Russian help.”

It is hard to know for sure whether those most actively promoting the Trump-Russian collusion narrative really believe it themselves or just see it as the best way of bringing down the president. About the latter they might be right. Already the anti-Trump forces have succeeded in gaining the appointment of a special prosecutor, and the scope of the special prosecutor’s investigation has expanded to legally flimsy charges of obstruction of justice against Trump. Once a special prosecutor is in the saddle there is no way of knowing where things will go. The longer the investigation continues the greater the chance of a prosecution for something entirely tangential to the original investigation.

Patrick Fitzgerald, for instance, was appointed special prosecutor to investigate the outing of CIA employee Valerie Flame. From the very outset of the investigation, he knew the source of that information; Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage was the one who told it to columnist Robert Novak. Armitage, however, was never prosecuted. But Fitzgerald carried on for years, until he claimed the scalp of Vice-President Richard Cheney’s top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on perjury charges, over statements given to investigators about which there were conflicting memories.

Putin has succeeded in driving a wedge between President and the intelligence agencies upon which he must rely for crucial decisions. Every week, a new leak emerges from some anonymous intelligence official – leaks which, if true, would subject the leaker to up to ten years in prison. Yet the source of these leaks has received little attention from the FBI or other investigative bodies.

Lee Smith bemoans in Tablet that the president’s very real flaws, which are “plain to every sentient being on the planet,” have been supplanted as a topic of discussion by a “toxic fabulism typical of Third World and Muslim societies.” “A vulgar conspiratorial mind-set [has become] the norm among the country’s educated elite . . . and is being legitimized daily by a truth-telling bureaucrats who make evidence-free and even deliberately false accusations behind a cloak of anonymity.”

Smith makes an insightful distinction between “consolations, vicious self-sung lullabies” and “conspiracy theories.” Examples of the former would be: Hillary lost because the Russians hacked the election; our children died because the Jews poisoned the wells.

But such “consolations,” as vicious as they may be, only become full-blown conspiracy theories when weaponized through the mass media for political use. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion would be the classic example of such a conspiracy theory. And, Smith points out, Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” do not have the platforms “to proliferate weaponized narratives capable of doing real damage to our polity – the elites do.” And those elites — the press, the intelligence community, political parties – have been used to legitimize a conspiracy theory.

James Kirchik, another anti-Trump pundit (as well as a brilliant analyst on many issues) laments the way the “confirmation bias” has resulted in well-meaning, liberal anti-Trump journalists reporting stories that they want to be true and are emotionally true for them – e.g., stories of threatened or actual violence against minorities – but are factually false.

He points to the non-stop anti-Trump vitriol from the Twitter feed of the New York Times assistant Washington D.C. editor, Jonathan Weissmann – anti-Trump vitriol that matches his own – as an example of the mainstream press having lost any claim to the public’s trust about the news stories it publishes.

In the short-run the beneficiary of the mainstream media’s reporting of baseless stories, such as that the Russians successfully hacked voting machines in key states, is Donald Trump. By refuting the wilder accusations, he can evade the more substantive ones and, at the same time, stoke the anger that brought him to the presidency in the first place.

But in the long-run, the current state of political toxicity, manifested last week in an assassination attempt against GOP congressman, and the loss of credibility of our major media organizations weakens America and its place in the world. And the big winner from that is Vladimir Putin.

I say Republican lawmakers owe us an explanation. Explain, please, why you allow yourselves to be led by the nose by the party that lost?

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So it has come to this —

No Republican is safe, whether it’s Jeff Sessions in the Senate on Tuesday, or Congressional Republicans at a baseball practice in Virginia on Wednesday.

Wednesday’s shooting, from a gunman identified as a Bernie Sanders supporter, hit and wounded House (GOP) Majority Whip Steve Scalise and others.

They were sent to the hospital. Scalise’s condition is apparently most serious, but all are hopefully expected to recover. But will the republic, seeing how the Democrats are on a tear; them and all leftists who call themselves the Resistance. That means resistance to President Trump.

The gunman (now dead from the heroic actions of the police) wanted to know whose team were playing ball there in Alexandria.

That’s who they’re really trying to bag, if by Red Scare innuendos in Congress or by mockery that plainly hints at the wishful thinking of a Trump assassination.

From Stephen Colbert’s rant, to Kathy Griffin’s head-on-a stick, to Shakespeare in the Park substituting Trump for the bludgeoning of Caesar, we know what they’re thinking…and we can only guess who they may be influencing.

There are any number of nut cases out there who get the general idea.

Those of us who watched Tuesday’s Senate hearing that featured Attorney General Jeff Sessions could only wonder when this will stop – this fixation on Russia.

Apparently it won’t stop any time soon. Sen. Mark Warner (D. Virginia) opened by demanding that Sessions make himself available for many more investigations still to come – as if Sessions has no day job, and as if branding Trump and all of Trump’s people no better than Russian spies will preoccupy Democrats from now until forever.

Have they no other business?

Do they ever listen to themselves talk, these Democrats, their desperation through nitpicking, to find something, anything that will stick?

Are they aware of their hysteria?

Who won this election anyway? Why are the Republicans, who did win, on the hot heat? You’d think it would be the other way round.

As for me, I thought a GOP sweep of the White House and Congress would send Hillary Clinton running for the hills.

She, not Sessions, would be begging for mercy. Or was it Sessions who was guilty of “extreme carelessness with classified material?’

Was it Sessions who destroyed evidence, even using a hammer to beat to death 30,000 e-mails?

No, all that was Hillary Clinton, aided by Huma Abedin and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Why are they taking sleeping medication, sleeping safe and snug while Sessions sweats his way through another day at the Inquisition, pleading for his job and his reputation, already in tatters as Democrats thrill to their success at character assassination en route to Trump.

People say Sessions was “feisty” at Tuesday’s Senate witch-hunt. I say he was lame.